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Editors’ choice

9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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I attended the National Book Awards last night — in formal wear and in meatspace for the first time since 2019 — and while everyone mingled before the official ceremony got underway, I kept hearing snippets of conversation along the lines of “It’s such a great book.” That’s not surprising, really. This was a book event filled with bookish people celebrating books; there were bound to be good recommendations bandied about. Still, it was heartening. Those overheard snippets are the same ones that stop me in the course of a normal day and entice me to linger, waiting to catch the title in question, equally prepared for the thrill of discovery or the thrill of recognition. You can see the list of last night’s winners here . Meanwhile, we have our own list of titles to recommend — each of them, for its own reason, such a great book. Happy reading.

—Gregory Cowles

THE SONG OF THE CELL: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human Siddhartha Mukherjee

Following excellent books on the history of cancer and the gene, Mukherjee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist, here turns his considerable storytelling gifts to the cell. His subject may be physically tiny but its medical implications are vast.

“I was repeatedly dazzled by his pointillist scenes, the enthusiasm of his explanations, the immediacy of his metaphors. ... Mukherjee has found an especially roomy subject for his roving intelligence.”

From Jennifer Szalai’s review

Scribner | $32.50

GET ’EM YOUNG, TREAT ’EM TOUGH, TELL ’EM NOTHING Robin McLean

The characters in this collection face ordeals from managing domestic clashes to hanging quite literally off the edge of a cliff, but they press on with humor and unstinting energy in freewheeling stories set all over the country.

“Really, everyone here is on the edge of some kind of cliff, and McLean unsentimentally renders their various precipices with incredible energy and humor. ... Her prose moves with muscle and rhythm, the dialogue swift and captivating.”

From Aimee Bender's review

And Other Stories | Paperback, $17.95

COME BACK IN SEPTEMBER: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan Darryl Pinckney

Pinckney’s elegant memoir of his long friendship with the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick doubles as a poignant elegy to a bygone world: that of New York intellectuals of the 1970s and ’80s, when thinking, reading, talking and writing were everything.

“A delight to read, full of deft character sketches and delicious gossip. ... I read and reread this book joyfully, catching many of Pinckney’s references, looking up others and letting the rest wash over me like lyrics from a half-forgotten song.”

From Maggie Doherty’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $32

GILDED MOUNTAIN Kate Manning

Set in a Colorado mining town in the early 1900s, Manning’s immersive third novel stars an impressionable young woman named Sylvie who is troubled by the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. A rousing yarn about family, feminism and loyalty, it’s also a crash course in the history of labor relations.

“There are views to admire, mysteries to be solved and love stories to escape into, but through it all Sylvie’s commitment to free speech and safe working conditions remains as solid — and as awe-inspiring — as the stone beneath her feet.”

From Elisabeth Egan’s Group Text column

Scribner | $28

THE REVOLUTIONARY : Samuel Adams Stacy Schiff

This enthralling biography is a persuasive exercise in rehabilitation. Through stylish prose and a close reading of Adams’s career as a canny propagandist, Schiff suggests that he may have done more than any other founder to prime colonists for armed rebellion and deserves to be better known.

“This brisk narrative of the outsize role that Adams played in colonial Massachusetts during the ‘messy, anarchic, provocative years’ before the Revolution places the reader at the center of the action. ... Schiff writes beautifully and lyrical passages provide a great deal of reading pleasure.”

From Amy S. Greenberg’s review

Little, Brown | $30

LATE SUMMER ODE Olena Kalytiak Davis

These poems capture the crisis that comes after the onset of the middle years, casting a retrospective glance (or wince) at choices made and compromises absorbed from the vantage of that wilderness between one’s fruitful 40s and the early signs of geriatric decline.

The “balance of rigidity, rhyme and ruin ... makes an Olena Kalytiak Davis poem extraordinarily distinct. Even when she’s alluding to Dante and Rilke and Chekhov, her voice is like no one else’s.”

From Jeff Gordinier’s review

Copper Canyon | Paperback, $17

THE ESCAPE ARTIST: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World Jonathan Freedland

Freedland, a journalist and novelist, tells the riveting story of the first man to successfully escape Auschwitz — and his fruitless attempts to make the world act.

“‘The Escape Artist’ includes harrowing details about Auschwitz that still have the power to shock. ... Vrba’s story teaches us to be aware of the human mind’s propensity to allow itself to be deceived, when confronted by facts that seem too horrible to believe.”

From Ruth Franklin's review

Harper/HarperCollins | $28.99

WHO’S RAISING THE KIDS? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children Susan Linn

In this passionate, compassionate and alarming call to arms, a child psychologist argues just how bad tech is for our kids — and just how cynically they’re being targeted.

“Play is profound; it is an activity that fosters growth and is essential for the development of empathy. Its power lies in its unstructured nature. Linn argues for strangeness and silence, for uncharted exploration. ... Tech companies destroy such play and replace it with device addiction.”

From Zephyr Teachout's review

New Press | $27.99

IS MOTHER DEAD Vigdis Hjorth

The Norwegian novelist Hjorth is something of a specialist in mordant, exacting depictions of familial estrangement; her latest novel, translated by Charlotte Barslund, recounts the increasingly obsessive efforts by a middle-aged painter to reunite with her mother, whom she has not spoken to for decades.

“Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. ... Childhood, the source of our earliest wounds, leaves enduring rivalries and rifts — the stuff of precise and affecting novels.”

From Naomi Huffman's review

Verso | $26.95

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The 100 Notable Books of 2023, According to the New York Times

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The list is split into Fiction and Nonfiction, with each book within getting a more specific label, like Family Saga for The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Experimental Fiction for Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, Literary Dystopia for Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Climate Fiction for Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang.

There are a lot of literary fiction picks on the list, but also genre titles like Holly by Stephen King (“Horror-Tinged Thriller”), Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Fantasy), and We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian (Romance).

Other categories include Poetry ( From From by Monica Youn), Satire ( Yellowface by R. F. Kuang), Science ( Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara), Politics ( Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, Memoir ( Pageboy by Elliot Page), and many more.

You can see the full list at The New York Times .

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in  Breaking in Books .

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• Seen & Heard

‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

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• Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
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Book Nation by Jen

Best book blog for reviews, recommendations and author interviews, ny times book recommendations – fiction 2023.

What to Read This Spring…

The New York Times recommends a variety of new fiction books to check out, from mystery, romance and horror to science, contemporary and historical fiction. Something for everyone in this well rounded list.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Mystery/Thriller)

Birnam Wood is on the move . . . 

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker–or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of  The Luminaries ,  Birnam Wood  is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (Contemporary Fiction)

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully guarded, old-money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, middle-class and from New England, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider, wondering how she might ever understand their WASP-y ways. Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can’t (and really shouldn’t) have and must confront the kind of person she wants to be. 

Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters,  Pineapple Street  is a smart escapist novel that sparkles with wit. It’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots and everything in between, and the insanity of first love.

River Spirit by Leila Aboulela (Historical Fiction)

The spellbinding new novel from New York Times Notable Author and Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela about an embattled young woman’s coming of age during the Mahdist War in 19th century Sudan. 

Leila Aboulela, hailed as “a versatile prose stylist” (New York Times) has also been praised by J.M. Coetzee, Ali Smith, and Ben Okri, among others, for her rich and nuanced novels depicting Islamic spiritual and political life. Her new novel is an enchanting narrative of the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, and a deeply human look at the tensions between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. In River Spirit, Aboulela gives us the unforgettable story of a people who—against the odds and for a brief time—gained independence from foreign rule through their willpower, subterfuge, and sacrifice.

When Akuany and her brother Bol are orphaned in a village raid in South Sudan, they’re taken in by a young merchant Yaseen who promises to care for them, a vow that tethers him to Akuany through their adulthood. As a revolutionary leader rises to power – the self-proclaimed Mahdi, prophesied redeemer of Islam – Sudan begins to slip from the grasp of Ottoman rule, and everyone must choose a side. A scholar of the Qur’an, Yaseen feels beholden to stand against this false Mahdi, even as his choice splinters his family. Meanwhile, Akuany moves through her young adulthood and across the country alone, sold and traded from house to house, with Yaseen as her inconsistent lifeline. Everything each of them is striving for – love, freedom, safety – is all on the line in the fight for Sudan.

Through the voices of seven men and women whose fates grow inextricably linked, Aboulela’s latest novel illuminates a fraught and bloody reckoning with the history of a people caught in the crosshairs of imperialism. River Spirit is a powerful tale of corruption, coming of age, and unshakeable devotion – to a cause, to one’s faith, and to the people who become family.

Take What You Need by Idra Novey (Contemporary Fiction)

In her most powerful book yet, award-winning writer Idra Novey has conjured a novel of “astonishing and singular” honesty (Rumaan Alam) with two determined, unforgettable female voices.

Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia,  Take What You Need  tracks the aftermath of a long estrangement between a stepmother and daughter. Leah is a web editor and young mother who’s sought an urban life and clean break from her rural childhood. But with her stepmother Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind.

What Leah discovers is astonishing: Jean has filled the house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history. There’s also a young man now living in the house who’s played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.

With great verve and humor, Idra Novey zeroes in on the joys and difficulty of family, the ease with which we let distance mute conflict, and the power we can draw from creative pursuits. 

Passionate and resonant,  Take What You Need  explores the continuing mystery of the people we love most, and what can be built from what others have discarded–art, unexpected friendship, a new contentment of self. This is Idra Novey at her very best.

Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke (Contemporary Romance)

Multi-prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Yan Lianke — ‘China’s most controversial novelist’ ( New Yorker)  — returns with a campus novel  like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptation

To tell the truth, religious faith is really just a matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories, and it is for the sake of stories that everyone lives on this earth.

Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.

Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her.

In this profoundly otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us.

** Beautiful edition illustrated throughout with beautiful original papercuts **

‘One of China’s greatest living authors’  Guardian

‘His talent cannot be ignored’  New York Times

‘China’s foremost literary satirist’  Financial Times

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano (Contemporary Fiction)

From the New York Times bestselling author of Dear Edward comes an emotionally layered and engrossing story of a family that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household.

But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

Vibrating with tenderness, Hello Beautiful is a gorgeous, profoundly moving portrait of what’s possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

Flux by Jinwoo Chong (Science Fiction)

A blazingly original and stylish debut novel about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his employers have inadvertently discovered time travel and are covering up a string of violent crimes.

Combining elements of neo-noir, speculative fiction, and ’80s detective shows, FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.

In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson’s  Neuromancer  and Ling Ma’s  Severance,  Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters —Bo, Brandon and Blue— who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control.

* After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family.

* 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls.

* 48-year-old Blue participates in a television exposé of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length.

Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic ’80s detective show,  Raider,  whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.

Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves?

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (LGBT Fiction)

From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist. When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. 

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow,  Biography of X  follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction,  Biography of X  is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Lone Women by Victor Lavalle (Horror/Historical Fiction)

Blue skies, empty land—and enough room to hide away a horrifying secret. Or is there? Discover a haunting new vision of the American West from the award-winning author of  The Changeling.

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.

The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.

Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense,  Lone Women  blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.

Commitment by Mona Simpson (Mental Health/Historical Fiction)

A masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.

When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste drive 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive.

At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realizes his life as a student may need to end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister, Lina, who works in an ice-cream parlor while her wealthy classmates are preparing for Ivy league schools, wages a high stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to hide in plain sight, coding, gaming and drifting towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.

Moving from Berkeley to Los Angeles and New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know first-hand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill,  Commitment  honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends, in determining the lives of our children left on their own. With  Commitment , Mona Simpson, one of the foremost chroniclers of the American family in our time, has written her most important and unforgettable novel.

Sea Change by Gina Chung (Contemporary Fiction/Fantasy)

A novel about a woman tossed overboard by heartbreak and loss, who has to find her way back to stable shores with the help of a giant Pacific octopus.

Ro is stuck. She’s just entered her thirties, she’s estranged from her mother, and her boyfriend has just left her to join a mission to Mars. Her days are spent dragging herself to her menial job at a mall aquarium, and her nights are spent drinking sharktinis (mountain dew and copious amounts of gin, plus a hint of jalapeno). With her best friend pulling away to focus on her upcoming wedding, Ro’s only companion is Dolores, a giant Pacific octopus who also happens to be Ro’s last remaining link to her father, a marine biologist who disappeared while on an expedition when Ro was a teenager.

When Dolores is sold to a wealthy investor intent on moving her to a private aquarium, Ro finds herself on the precipice of self-destruction. Wading through memories of her youth, Ro has one last chance to come to terms with her childhood trauma, recommit to those around her, and find her place in an ever-changing world. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

The New Earth by Jess Row (Literary Fiction)

A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past and confronting humanity’s uncertain future, from award-winning author Jess Row  For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper. Now, in 2018, Winter Wilcox is getting married, and her only demand is that her mother, father, and brother emerge from their self-imposed isolations and gather once more. After decades of neglecting personal and political wounds, each remaining family member must face their fractured history and decide if they can ever reconcile. Assembling a vast chorus of voices and ideas from across the globe, Jess Row “explodes the saga from within—blows the roof off, so to speak, to let in politics, race, theory, and the narrative self-awareness that the form had seemed hell-bent on ignoring” (Jonathan Lethem). The New Earth is a commanding investigation of our deep and impossible desire to undo the injustices we have both inflicted and been forced to endure. 

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (Contemporary Romance)

A comedy writer thinks she’s sworn off love, until a dreamily handsome pop star flips the script on all her assumptions.  Romantic Comedy  is a hilarious, observant and deeply tender novel from  New York Times –bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Sally Milz is a sketch writer for “The Night Owls,” the late-night live comedy show that airs each Saturday. With a couple of heartbreaks under her belt, she’s long abandoned the search for love, settling instead for the occasional hook-up, career success, and a close relationship with her stepfather to round out a satisfying life.

But when Sally’s friend and fellow writer Danny Horst begins dating Annabel, a glamorous actor who guest-hosted the show, he joins the not-so-exclusive group of talented but average-looking and even dorky men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch called the “Danny Horst Rule,” poking fun at this phenomenon while underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models, who signed on as both host and musical guest for this week’s show. Dazzled by his charms, Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder whether there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy; it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her…right?

With her keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Sittenfeld explores the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love, while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Contemporary Fiction)

A powerful novel about the saving grace of language and human connection, from the author of the International Booker Prize winner  The Vegetarian

“Now and then, language would thrust its way into her sleep like a skewer through meat, startling her awake several times a night…”

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. 

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence. 

Greek Lessons  tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish—the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity—their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression. 

Greek Lessons  is the story of the unlikely bond between this pair and a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection—a novel to awaken the senses, one that vividly conjures the essence of what it means to be alive.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane (Mystery/Thriller)

“ Small Mercies  is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can’t-put-it-down entertainment.” — Stephen King The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River —an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston’s history. In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart. One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business. Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwme Adjei-Brenyah (Science Fiction/Dystopia)

The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the  New York Times -bestselling author of  Friday Black , about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own. 

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond,  Chain-Gang All-Stars  is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (Historical Fiction)

From the  New York Times –bestselling author of  Cutting for Stone  comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. The Covenant of Water  is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of  Cutting for Stone . Published in 2009,  Cutting for Stone  became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining on the  New York Times  bestseller list for over two years. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977,  The Covenant of Water  is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new work: there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life. A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself,  The Covenant of Water  is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin (Science Fiction/Dystopia)

Founded by the mysterious genius known as the Designer, the archipelago of Prospera lies hidden from the horrors of a deteriorating outside world. In this island paradise, Prospera’s lucky citizens enjoy long, fulfilling lives until the monitors embedded in their forearms, meant to measure their physical health and psychological well-being, fall below 10 percent. Then they retire themselves, embarking on a ferry ride to the island known as the Nursery, where their failing bodies are renewed, their memories are wiped clean, and they are readied to restart life afresh.

Proctor Bennett, of the Department of Social Contracts, has a satisfying career as a ferryman, gently shepherding people through the retirement process–and, when necessary, enforcing it. But all is not well with Proctor. For one thing, he’s been dreaming–which is supposed to be impossible in Prospera. For another, his monitor percentage has begun to drop alarmingly fast. And then comes the day he is summoned to retire his own father, who gives him a disturbing and cryptic message before being wrestled onto the ferry.

Meanwhile, something is stirring. The Support Staff, ordinary men and women who provide the labor to keep Prospera running, have begun to question their place in the social order. Unrest is building, and there are rumors spreading of a resistance group–known as “Arrivalists”–who may be fomenting revolution.

Soon Proctor finds himself questioning everything he once believed, entangled with a much bigger cause than he realized–and on a desperate mission to uncover the truth.

From the  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Passage  comes a riveting standalone novel about a group of survivors on a hidden island utopia–where the truth isn’t what it seems.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks

From the Academy Award-winning actor and best-selling author: a novel about the making of a star-studded, multimillion-dollar superhero action film . . . and the humble comic books that inspired it. Funny, touching, and wonderfully thought-provoking, while also capturing the changes in America and American culture since World War II.

Part One of this story takes place in 1947. A troubled soldier, returning from the war, meets his talented five-year-old nephew, leaves an indelible impression, and then disappears for twenty-three years.

Cut to 1970:  The nephew, now drawing underground comic books in Oakland, California, reconnects with his uncle and, remembering the comic book he saw when he was five, draws a new version with his uncle as a World War II fighting hero.

Cut to the present day:  A commercially successful director discovers the 1970 comic book and decides to turn it into a contemporary superhero movie.

Cue the cast:  We meet the film’s extremely difficult male star, his wonderful leading lady, the eccentric writer/director, the producer, the gofer production assistant, and everyone else on both sides of the camera.

Bonus material:  Interspersed throughout are three comic books that are featured in the story–all created by Tom Hanks himself–including the comic book that becomes the official tie-in to this novel’s major motion picture masterpiece.

Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Historical Fiction)

An epic yet intimate novel about a Colombian man caught up in the sweep of global historical and ideological revolutions.  

The Colombian film director, Sergio Cabrera, is in Barcelona for a retrospective of his work. It’s a hard time for him: his father, famous actor Fausto Cabrera, has just died; his marriage is in crisis; and his home country has rejected peace agreements that might have ended more than fifty years of war. In the course of a few intense days, as his films are on exhibit, Sergio recalls the events that marked his family’s unusual and dramatic lives: especially his father’s, his sister Marianella’s and his own.

Growing up in Colombia as the children of famous actors, Sergio and Marianella were privileged and artistic, until their parents became disillusioned with bourgeois conventions and moved the entire family to China. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was underway and the family lived in an entirely ex-pat hotel where they learned Chinese and joined the revolution, became members of the Red Guard, and trained as guerilla fighters. When they returned to Colombia to support the revolution there, they were sent into the countryside to join the guerilla force, were shot at and nearly died. Out of these lives molded by ideology and zealotry, came an artistic second life for Sergio as he escaped the movement and became his country’s most celebrated film director.

From the Spanish Civil War to the exile of his family to Latin America, and from the Cultural Revolution in China to the guerrilla movements of 1960s Colombia, Sergio and his family’s experience is extraordinary by any standards. Equal parts family saga and epic historical novel,  Retrospective  reveals the story of one man and his family — based on real people and events — and a devastating portrait of the forces that shaped their lives, and for half a century turned the world upside down.

The Guest by Emma Cline (Mystery/Fiction)

A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this stunning novel by the  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Girls .

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s  The Guest  is a spellbinding literary achievement.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (Contemporary Fiction)

What’s the harm in a pseudonym?  New York Times  bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly  not  Asian American–in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R. F. Kuang in the vein of  White Ivy  and  The Other Black Girl. 

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song–complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the  New York Times  bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice,  Yellowface  takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

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The Non-science Behind The New York Times Best Sellers List

H ave you read " Dragons Love Tacos "? If you haven't, where have you been? This delightful children's book has been on The New York Times Best Sellers list for more than seven years. Granted, it's in the Children's Picture Books category , but as of July 2, 2023, "Dragons Love Tacos" has spent more than 400 weeks on the list (or more than seven years); that's more time than almost any adult book except "The Road Less Traveled" and " The Glass Castle ."

Plus, just a couple decades ago, children and adult books were on the same list, until a teenage wizard necessitated the separation.

Whether the material is written for the young, old or anyone with an imagination, getting a book on any of The New York Times' Best Sellers lists is a boon for authors and publishers alike. It increases sales and prestige, and could make a film deal more of a possibility, Constance Grady wrote for Vox . Book covers, online listings and author websites make the most of being included, so what does it take to get there? It's complicated.

What Is The New York Times Best Sellers List?

The New York Times Best Sellers list is a series of weekly and monthly lists that do just what they sound like — recognize current top sellers. They are "compiled and archived by The Best Seller Lists Desk of The New York Times News Department, and are separate from the Editorial, Culture, Advertising and Business sides of The New York Times Company," according to the About the Best Sellers page of the Times' website. That means they are distinct from the Book Review or lists of recommendations like Best Books .

"The New York Times Best Seller lists consist of multiple categories, each measuring different sale types," a spokesperson for The New York Times said in an email interview.

Currently there are 11 weekly lists and seven monthly lists. New lists go live online Wednesdays at 7 p.m. EST. A portion of those lists appears in print 11 days later, due to the newspaper's printing schedule.

The weekly lists separate books into three categories: fiction, nonfiction and children's books. Fiction and nonfiction are further broken down into subcategories for hardcover, paperback, and combined print and digital sales. Nonfiction has an additional subcategory for how-to books. Children's books are divided into middle grade hardcover, picture books, series and young adult hardcover.

The monthly lists have more specialized categories like audio books, graphic books and manga, and mass market.

How Do Books Land on the NYT Best Sellers Lists?

Books are included on the list when they are best sellers; sounds simple, right?

"The lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week," according to the New York Times spokesperson. "These standards are applied consistently to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular in that time frame. Our methodology is published with the lists online and our goal is that the lists reflect authentic best sellers."

The gist of the methodology is that rankings reflect weekly sales reports from vendors or booksellers. For print books, that means chains, independent bookstores, online retailers, supermarkets, other types of bookstores and newsstands.

Digital sales come from online vendors of e-books for various e-reader formats. Most importantly, the sales data is reported to The Times by the vendors, and sales are defined as completed transactions by vendors and individual end-users.

Despite this explanation, some members of the publishing industry have raised questions about the methodology. "No one outside The New York Times knows exactly how its best sellers are calculated — and the list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers," Sophie Vershbow wrote in Esquire .

What Books Make the List?

As books are judged by the sales, not their literary value or other criteria, being on a NYT Best Sellers list is not an indication of a future Pulitzer Prize or another prestigious book award like the Booker Prize or the National Book Award . The Best Seller List is simply a numbers game that can give recognized authors and celebrities a leg up.

In the nonfiction category, some books are bound for the list, like "Spare" by Prince Harry or Michelle Obama's "The Light We Carry."

But debut novels from noncelebrity authors have a tougher time landing on the list. In 2021, for example, only five of the 15 debut novels on the hardcover fiction list were written by noncelebrity authors. And none of those five were endorsed by other celebrities or their book clubs, like Oprah's Book Club or the Good Morning America Book Club .

Likewise, well-known commercial fiction authors regularly appear on the list, so on any given week, you might notice the latest work by Nora Roberts, James Patterson or David Baldacci.

But there is plenty of room for others as books move in, out, up and down the lists. Even first-time authors show up with some regularity. Debuts by Jenny Jackson, Nita Prose, Sarah Penner, Chloe Gong and Robert Jones Jr. appeared in recent years.

The Longest-running Books on the Lists

You might think J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," the first book in the series, would be the longest-running best seller, and that would be a good guess; it has clocked in at 743 weeks as of the lists dated July 2, 2023 . But it is a close second to Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," which has spent the most time on any New York Times Best-Seller list, appearing 744 times on the children's series list as of the same week.

As indicated by the wild success of "Harry Potter" and "Diary," the highest sales figures appear where kids' books are concerned. Consider the 401-week run of R. J. Palacio's "Wonder" on the middle grade list alongside "Dragons Love Tacos," 403 weeks on the picture book list.

Plenty of books rank as soon as they are published — the instant best sellers. Other books might take longer.

The fourth book in the Bridgerton romance novel series, "Romancing Mister Bridgerton," which was first published in 2002, had a strong showing on the best-seller lists after the popular series on Netflix was released in 2020.

The late Toni Morrison's searing debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," about a poor Black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio, made the list when it was originally published in 1970. Though it resurfaced on the Paperback Trade Fiction list in 2020 and again in 2021.

How Some Authors Have Gamed the List

If the list is based solely on sales, can't publishers, authors and others (with the funds) simply buy up lots of their own books to get on the list and launch their works and maybe their careers?

The short answer is yes. It has happened numerous times , despite the ethical issues doing so raises. Vanity Fair reported in 2013 that Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls"— which has sold more than 30 million copies since it was published in 1966 — got a major boost when Susann's husband Irving Mansfield got his hands on the names of 125 bookstores that The New York Times polled when compiling its best-seller list. He then spearheaded a book-buying campaign at those stores and sales skyrocketed.

Author Wayne Dyer bought 4,500 copies of his book "Your Erroneous Zones," "virtually the entire first printing," according to The Washington Post . In fact, there are agencies whose sole job is getting clients on the list.

The New York Times does not take such manipulations lightly. In a 2018 series, the Best Sellers List staff wrote a piece explaining its journalistic practices .

"We feel strongly that the best-seller lists should reflect the sale of books to individual end users. In other words, they should be sales to actual readers."

Since 1995, when a book with evident bulk purchases is included on a best sellers list, it appears with a dagger (†) to denote the skewed numbers.

Now That's Interesting The NYT lists rank books based on weekly sales rather than other factors, such as speed. Looked at from the standpoint of fast sales, Prince Harry's "Spare" ousted President Barack Obama's 2020 "A Promised Land" as the fastest-selling nonfiction book , and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" holds the title of fastest-selling book overall, according to Guinness World Records .

Original article: The Non-science Behind The New York Times Best Sellers List